Varnish

Overall Opinion: What Varnish manages to accomplish is complex, but it could give anyone from small businesses to enterprises a leg up against their competition. At the crux of Varnish's message is the increasing complexity of internet outreach. With platforms like Squarespace making it easier and easier for people without any coding experience to put together a well polished site, and with the maintenance of an internet presence as a practical necessity in modern business, companies need to be increasingly complicated with their web design to stand apart from the competition. But there's a balance that needs to be maintained between complexity and convenience, and the more elaborate your site becomes, the less responsive it is to the needs or your customers. Varnish integrates protocol into your site that improves its performance, allowing you to unshackle your imagination and create the site of your dreams without having to worry about the practical demands of performance. Varnish is a content delivery network that manages to streamline your performance regardless of the assets you're using or heavy and unpredictable traffic to your site. The caching features inherent in web protocol simply can't keep up with the demands of many popular and modern businesses, but Varnish circumvents this by integrating web acceleration technology into your site. In layman's terms, it makes your site run faster regardless of the stress put on it. Integration is easy, since Varnish relies on application program interfaces (APIs) to accomplish its goals. It's as simple as plugging in a few lines of code to link your site directly to the Varnish platform. Varnish is strengthened by its strong approach to compatibility. The architecture Varnish uses is agnostic, meaning it can function equally as well on all of the major content management systems. Whether you build your site through WordPress, Magento, or Amazon Experience Manager, you can count on Varnish to provide you with increased performance without having to worry about complex configurations or troubleshooting. Security was clearly given high priority in the construction of Varnish. You won't be sacrificing performance just to worry about making yourself vulnerable to cyber threats. This platform uses dual-key AES 256 encryption to lock potential threats out of your system and ensure that they don't use Varnish as a waypoint into your private content databases. It even contains its own firewall to provide you with an extra layer of protection instead of having to rely on third party services to achieve the same results. While the technology that powers Varnish may be powerful, you don't have to be a tech wizard to oversee its performance. A dedicated dashboard allows you to evaluate all of the major metrics associated with the platform without understanding the technical details. All of it is neatly laid out in easy to digest visualizations like noise charts, graphs, and odometers.

Pros: Provides exceptional performance for even the most dynamic sites Compartmentalizes the tech into easily digestible and tracable metrics

Cons: As a high tech solution to high end problems, it isn't a great fit for smaller companies The technology that powers it can be a bit inscrutable to less tech savvy users